Bug 183004

Summary:	Kmail's threaded view sometimes not sorted correclty
Product:	[Unmaintained] kmail	Reporter:	Roland Leißa <roland.leissa>
Component:	new message list	Assignee:	kdepim bugs <kdepim-bugs>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED
Severity:	normal	CC:	bjoern, pancho.s
Priority:	NOR
Version:	unspecified
Target Milestone:	---
Platform:	Gentoo Packages
OS:	Linux
Latest Commit:		Version Fixed In:
Sentry Crash Report:
Attachments:	three screenshots of different sorting

Description Roland Leißa 2009-02-03 15:03:58 UTC

Version:            (using KDE 4.2.0)
OS:                Linux
Installed from:    Gentoo Packages

First of all: The new threaded view is awesome.
However there seems to be a subtle bug somewhere in the sorting/aggregation code. Have a look a the screenshot (actually three screenshots). It seems to be absolutely random whether those seven red marked mails are sorted in to one, two or even more threads. I just click on another mail-folder and go back to the original one to find a different sorting. 

My guess is that a presorting is done and then another sorting is done which is not a stable sorting algorithm (perhaps quicksort based, that would explain the random behavior).

Comment 1 Roland Leißa 2009-02-03 15:07:21 UTC

Created attachment 30911 [details]
three screenshots of different sorting

Sometimes I get all seven mails in one thread. I didn't include that screenshot. This is variant I prefer.

Comment 2 Roland Leißa 2009-02-03 15:13:26 UTC

Oh my settings:
Sorting: 
- by date/time of most recent in sub tree
- most recent on top
- descending

aggregation:
- Current activity, threaded

Comment 3 Roland Leißa 2010-01-24 14:18:12 UTC

still valid in KDE 4.4 RC 1

Comment 4 Bernd Oliver Sünderhauf 2011-12-21 01:08:25 UTC

Hi Roland,
we need more information in order to reproduce your bug.
While there are certainly several bugs left in the threading mechanism, it is quite hard to figure out in which specific scenarios threading behaves the way you describe.

Some aspects we can infer from your screenshots are:
1. you're keeping your sent mail in one folder together with incoming mail.
2. your answers are always correctly subordinated to the respective incoming messages 
3. it's only the incoming answers that seem to be randomly subordinated to their predecessor (or not).

Some aspects we'd need to know:
1. Firstly, does the bug still exist in KDE 4.7?
2. Then, does this happen regularly with your threads or only with this specific set of mails?
3. Could you please check in the details of "Current activity, threaded" setting whether mails are threaded by exact match only, or exact/references, or exact/references/subject?
4. Do the incoming mails in this thread have "In-Reply-To" and "References" headers or not?
5. Does the bug happen only with incoming mails that are missing "In-Reply-To" and "References" headers?
6. Are the subjects of the answers just a "Re: " + the last subject?

Sorry, if this takes some of your time, but it would be very helpful for tracking the bug down.
THX, Pancho

Comment 5 Roland Leißa 2011-12-26 17:29:01 UTC

Hi Bernd,

I'm currently not using the threaded view anymore (as I'm preferring a flat view). However, I played a bit with the threaded view again and I didn't noticed any problems. So I guess you can mark it as fixed.